Spun: Down and Out in Bangkok Part 2

Spun. The fever dream is on me, has me in it’s clutches. I’ll black out for three days and stumble about Bangkok but to me it will feel like a week.I’m having an allergic reaction to an antibiotic and don’t really know what really happened. In the past I’ve taken psychedelic drugs that most have never heard of. But I’ve never experienced anything like this.

I’m going down. And I’m going down hard.

The first nightmare is the weirdest. My backpack keeps morphing into an alien, a Rastafarian-looking guy who only has 3 fingers. I’m trying to get a photo of this and when I look through the viewfinder I see other people. One is a chiseled man with crazily intricate tattoos and weird spiked ridges like knives that extrude from his forearms. Another has arms that hang to his knees. I get a glimpse of a naked imp-like woman but unfortunately she keeps out of sight after that.

They’re time travelers from the year 2046, here to document life in 2014.

I’m spun.

In the end, they’ll kidnap me and take me into the future where they want me to play the ‘hero’ and save some children from a terrorist. Then I’ll be a political player and can further their agenda — “Man from the past saves the day” kind of thing. When they explain that exactly 19 children will have to die in the attack to ‘make it look real’, I back out.

“That’s not happening on my watch”.

They’ve already shot me full of nano-drugs and my arm actually lights up with pop-up messages that I have to press to banish — wired, interactive tattoos. As the nano takes hold, I watch worms crawl through my flesh.

My ‘minder’ gets on the phone and that’s when the assassins move in — I’m no longer an ‘asset’. They have ‘blur suits’ which are invisible until they move and I smash the bathroom sink so I can see their foot prints in the water (I was pretty proud of that). There is a nice couple hanging out in the room and I carefully write out a message and ask them to deliver it to the news stations if I disappear.

“I’m not dead. I’ve been kidnapped. Please send help. – Wes Nations”

I manage to escape and end up in a small cabin by the shore with four others, being attacked by a group of a dozen mercenaries. Only two of us make it out alive. I kick a man in the head over and over until I hear his neck snap.

I’ll end up on a wooden boat with a knife wound to my left knee that gushes blood as a man tries desperately to stop the flow, first with gauze and then finally with duct tape. I bleed out and die on the wooden floor of the boat as a woman I don’t know holds my hand and weeps.

I always thought bleeding to death would be cold but this was warm and wet.

Spun.

The nightmares continue, rolling and relentless. There’s one where I have to ride a speedboat over a ramp and leap into the air to escape my enemies. Then I’m stuck in a hotel where I can’t find my girlfriend — I hear her voice and knock on the door of another man’s room and hear her getting dressed. There’s a snap of panties.

Spun.

Some of the hallucinations are mundane: riding on a mototaxi to a bar that serves a decent beer.

There’s a hummingbird there that likes to land on my left leg because I have a small black circle on my pants (I don’t). I and a nun (!) try to hide pot from the military on a battleship. I meet Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister in an elevator. (Turns out that he’s a nice guy and a fan of my site).

And then it gets ugly. It gets really fucking ugly.

I’m in a hotel in Bangkok and go downstairs to get water. I’m surprised to find my brother there and he’s pissed. My phone has been dead and he thinks I’ve been avoiding him.

“Uncle Don died 2 days ago.” Don is the man who, without even trying, taught me how to tell a story and I treasure him. I start to cry and then my brother hits me with this: “Mom died yesterday”. I fall to the ground.

Total mindfuck.

I end up sitting on a terrace talking to a Rabbi (don’t ask me where that came from — I don’t know). I’m crying and he talks me down. I have a beer in my hand and say “Sorry, Rabbi… I don’t know these things. Is drinking this in front of you a sin?”

“Probably so, son, but with the day you’ve had, I think God will give you a pass.”

And that’s when I get the tap on the shoulder. Security. “Sir, will you come with us? Something has happened in your room.”

A second cousin has killed his wife, two children and himself in my room. Blood is splattered all over the walls. I can still remember the smell –that’s what really sticks with me– iron and the disinfectant some poor bastard is using, trying to wipe it all off.

“The hotel is full, so you’ll have to sleep in here. But don’t touch anything: it’s a crime scene.”

“There is no way in hell that I’m sleeping in this room. I’ll sleep on the street before I sleep in here.”

I’ll spend the night bunked with a room full of marines (no idea) and when the major tells them that I’ve just lost half of my family, a woman steps up and says “Take my bunk. I’ll sleep up top”.

I try to weep quietly.

Spun.

The last one is odd. I’m on a blogger tour, on a cruise ship. My friend Jodi of legalnomads.com is there, as is Glenn of Vagabondians.com And apparently I’ve made such an ass of myself that everyone is shunning me. (I also end up meeting Manny Pacquiao, the Filipino boxer and senator — he’s a nice guy).

I wake up, in the real world finally, in a hotel that I don’t recognize. I’m convinced that I was on this blogger tour and that they had ditched me. All of my gear is in plastic bags — the previous hotel ‘escorted’ me out. I don’t know if I was crying, screaming or smashing toilets to catch the time-traveling assassins. It’s all black.

The maid is pounding on my door — I’m well past checkout. I don’t know where I am and think I’m in some imaginary town north of Bangkok. In truth I’m only a block away from where I started.

I can’t find my goods and email Jodi: “I know I was being an ass but it’s not cool that they took my passport, phone and then left me behind”. She promptly, God bless her, answers back: “Wes, I haven’t seen you in three years. You’re scaring me.”

She reels me in.

I stagger to a nearby hotel and slowly come back to reality.

The phone was wrapped in a pair of socks and I had wiped it to protect my friends from the time-travelers. My passport was in my med-kit — no idea why. I only lost a Leatherman multitool — I got off light, all things considered.

I want to think that all of this happened while I was in bed. But I have to rip my pack apart to find everything and in doing so, I find a torn strip of paper with my own handwriting on it.

Ha, this is hilarious. It looks like your symptoms are similar to what happens in my sever alley attacks to the spring time in Europe at the moment. I’m completely delirious!Ryan recently posted..Arriving in Rome: a childhood dream fulfilled

Dude. Dixie had a bad reaction to some antibiotics here once. Wanted to climb out the window and walk across the top of the plastic panels covering the driveway. It’s evidently a known hallucinogenic side effect of any of the flox- antibiotic family.